Bestiary

  “All of this impressed Byron enormously. He never expected to stumble on such rich material while working on a grammar in a monastery: the mysterious book, its arcane history, Pigafetta’s selflessness in the face of death. Byron had already written two verse dramas steeped in Venetian history; in his letters he mentioned wanting to write a third—with Antonio Pigafetta as its protagonist—and until now, no one knew why. But here’s where the story gets really interesting. Byron urged Father Aucher to complete Pigafetta’s interrupted mission by arranging for the bestiary to be transported to Armenia. He thought Pigafetta had been honoring, not just the book, but Armenia herself, in undertaking such a mission, and that his last wishes ought to be respected. In Byron’s translation, Pigafetta cites a dream in which he clutched the bestiary while descending a snowy mountain among thousands of divers animals. Certain the mountain was Ararat, Pigafetta took this as a sign that the bestiary should be returned to the site of its creation, rather than knocking about the world like forgotten cargo. For the sake of completeness, it must be so, he added cryptically. Byron saw the repatriation of the bestiary more as an issue of nationalism, not mysticism: first and foremost, the book belonged to the Armenians. Father Aucher agreed, and when Byron finished translating Pigafetta’s notes, the abbot enlisted a young monk named Adolphus Sarkas to be the courier. Aucher had written to the Metropolitan Zakalian in Ani and informed him that Brother Sarkas would be bringing the gift of a rare book to the Monastery of Saint Jacob. Here on San Lazzaro, Sarkas was an icon painter. He ground gold, lapis lazuli, and cinnabar into a base of egg tempera which he applied to thin blocks of cedar. He painted the chapel mural and the altar panels of Saint Clement and Saint Mark that you so admired.”

  “They’re amazing,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “They would be better known if this weren’t the city of Tintoretto and Veronese. Few people come out here.”

  Unlike the typically austere renderings of the saints, with their baleful undertones, Adolphus Sarkas’s panels were detailed with vivid colors—green wings, vermilion robes, yellow hair—the faces radiating light so real it seemed not to be composed of paint. I had seen portraits that lifelike in museums, but never from the brush of an ecclesiastical painter. His mural was equally bold: extending the length of the side wall, it depicted Saint Veronica in her cave conversing with the Angel Gabriel. The composition was perfectly balanced, the perspective calibrated to pull the observer in, so that I felt as if I were standing inside the cave with the two figures. A myriad of elements were working in unison, but three immediately caught my eye: over Gabriel’s shoulder, outside the cave, the raging storm his whirlwind had set off; the golden glow of his fiery wings that illuminated the cave; and the black spiders on which Veronica subsisted that covered the walls, red crosses on their backs and their eyes the same amber as her own.

  “With a glazier from Murano,” Marczek went on, “Sarkas collaborated on the stained-glass window in the dining hall. Clearly the monk had a sense of humor, executing such a sumptuous version of the Last Supper for his brothers to gaze on while they ate. But, all in all, he was considered an industrious member of the community, a loner who expressed his devotion with his craft. Father Aucher thought him efficient, pious, trustworthy. The perfect emissary to the Metropolitan.

  “Byron was a shrewder judge of character, and his take on Sarkas was not so positive. Though he admired Sarkas’s artwork, he observed that Sarkas had the annoying habit of staring at his feet when he spoke. Some might deem this a sign of humility, Byron wrote, but I think the opposite: his pride is so overweening, he cannot look you in the eye. I have known many such men. However they contain it, in the end their dishonesty must prevail…

  “Events bore him out, for apparently Sarkas never reached Ani, or even set foot in Armenia. He got as far as Izmir on the Turkish coast before veering south to Cyprus and Rhodes—then disappearing. And the bestiary with him. It’s certain he left Rhodes, but his ultimate destination remains a mystery. Father Aucher waited for him to turn up, or to send a message explaining his actions, but he was never heard from again.”

  Marczek sat back with a sigh. “That’s all I know. Maybe more than I thought I knew,” he said drily. “But I’m sure you have a few questions.”

  “A few hundred.”

  My head was racing, and I hadn’t even noticed that darkness had fallen over the lagoon.

  Marczek glanced at his watch and stood up. “The monks would offer us accommodations, but I’d prefer to catch the last vaporetto. Then, over dinner, you can tell me everything I don’t know about the Caravan Bestiary.”

  I smiled. “It will be a pleasure.”

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, the twenty-eighth of February, Marczek and I had been invited to attend Talmet’s monthly séance as his personal guest. This was an honor, seeing as the other participants paid 200,000 lire each. The séance was to begin at eleven P.M. in the Palazzo Mocenigo, which had once been Byron’s Venetian residence.

  Marczek and I took a water taxi up the Grand Canal in a soft rain. We passed crowded vaporetti, their glowing windows salt-smeared. At San Samuele, disembarking passengers were indistinct, outlined in charcoal. The invitation said formal attire, so I had put on a black suit and black shirt. In the taxi’s cramped cabin, over the roar of the engine, Marczek told me some of the palazzo’s illustrious history. The Mocenigo family had produced seven doges and played host to a stream of distinguished visitors. Two centuries before Byron leased the place, Giordano Bruno, the alchemist, was the houseguest of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo. Mocenigo attempted in vain to learn Bruno’s al-chemical secrets, then out of spite denounced him to the Inquisition as a heretic. Imprisoned and tortured for eight years, Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome on orders of Pope Clement VIII. His ashes were scattered in the Tiber, but his angry ghost returned to Venice to roam the Palazzo Mocenigo.

  “Perhaps,” Marczek concluded, turning up his collar, “Bruno will appear for us tonight. Unless we’re truly lucky and Byron materializes.”

  A sprawling five-story building, the palazzo was ocher colored, with green shutters and a terra-cotta roof. Its upper windows were brightly lit. Smoke curled from one of the chimneys. After bounding across the canal, we stepped onto the submerged landing, thick with algae, where a footman held open a heavy door. The dimly lit room we entered was spacious, bare of furniture, with a low ceiling. Portraits of the Mocenigo family stared down at us. I also noted an image of Saint Theodore, atop his crocodile, on a marble tile embedded in the wall.

  “This is where Byron kept his menagerie,” Marczek said, leading me to a stairway, and I tried to imagine those animals coexisting in that dank space. I wondered if any of their spirits would be making an appearance at the séance. My grandmother hadn’t required a ceremony to commune with them. One of the few items from my childhood I still possessed was her music box containing the white whisker.

  We climbed to the third floor, where the ceilings were higher and the rooms large. The butler took our coats and led us down a corridor to a circular room with drawn curtains. On the black table candles were burning. The ceiling was a mural of the night sky, with the Roman goddess of night, robed in stars, standing astride a pair of streaking comets. A fire was crackling in the marble fireplace. We were the last guests to arrive, but the room was strangely silent. There were nine other people scattered around, formally dressed, sipping tea—no alcohol permitted before the séance, and no conversation. Talmet was not among them. Some of the guests were more ghostly than any ghost: an old couple with yellowing white hair; an ashen, bearded man beribboned with medals gazing at a bust of Giovanni Mocenigo (hatchet-faced, slit-eyed, he looked like an informer); a grim young woman smoking on a couch beside a fat woman in a tiara. The fat woman was so pale she could have been wearing whiteface.

  Our hostess, a tall blue-eyed woman with silver hair and a gown to match, glided over.

  “Welcome, Count. Mr. Atlas.”

  Marcze
k kissed her hand. “Signora Camarelli.” After she moved on, he murmured, “Her husband used to control the bauxite monopoly in Italy.”

  Now he was one of the spirits Talmet hoped to summon.

  The lights went down and Talmet entered the room. He wore a burgundy velvet jacket with shoes to match. Stitched on his pocket in gold was a lightning bolt crossed by a dagger—instruments for tearing the fabric of time, and a symbol of life after death. Talmet shook hands solemnly with everyone. When it was my turn, and our eyes met, there was no acknowledgment of the scene I had witnessed at the nightclub. Just a quick handshake and a pat on the shoulder.

  The lights went down. I took the seat assigned me, between the beribboned gentleman—a retired general—and the elderly lady. The grim young woman was sitting opposite me. Talmet was at the head of the table, Marczek to his right, Signora Camarelli to his left. The butler tinkled a bell and set a large glass sphere in the middle of the table. It was midnight blue, capped with glittering gold crystals. If all went well, the crystals would shoot rays far out into the night, communication lines to the dead.

  Talmet laid his palms flat on the table and fixed his gaze on the sphere. His face was calm. In a role so easy to overplay, he stayed within himself, projecting both humility and command. His body language sent a clear message: I’m indispensable here, but I’ll remain detached enough so you can judge the proceedings for yourself. He offered no speeches, and his instructions were simple: join hands, close your eyes, and concentrate on the person you want to contact; he would see to the rest.

  He joined hands with Marczek and Signora Camarelli, and the rest of us followed suit with our neighbors. The old lady’s hand was dry, the general’s damp. Keeping my eyes partly open, I watched the young woman, grimmer than ever, bite her lip. There seemed to be much at stake for her.

  I followed Talmet’s suggestion and concentrated on my mother. At first, nothing happened. Every few minutes, Talmet compressed his lips and hummed deeply, fell silent, and hummed again. This went on for some time. No one else made a sound. The blue sphere was his only prop; there were none of the special effects or elaborate paraphernalia I had expected. This was more an exercise in collective meditation than theatrical illusion. The fire crackled. Rain pattered the windows. Talmet hummed. And I picked up no frequency on which I could contact my mother. Nor did I feel emanations from the spirits of Byron and Giordano Bruno. I began to drift.

  The voice that broke into my reverie was decidedly human. “Michael!” the fat lady cried, pointing at the window.

  “Please sit, Signora Starza,” Talmet said gently. “If you break the circle, you won’t see him at all.”

  She looked bewildered. “You’re right—he’s gone now.”

  “Please join hands again,” Talmet said.

  And she did.

  This was the dramatic high point of the evening. If anyone else spotted a dead relative or friend, they didn’t let on. Near the end of the séance, the elderly lady and the general claimed to hear voices. She said her mother had identified the mastermind behind the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The general reported that his late wife told him a massive explosion in Antarctica in 2027 would mark the end of the world.

  I had erroneously thought that a successful séance must be a collective exercise, everyone sharing in the same sights and sounds, seeking a glimpse into what my grandmother used to call il Grande Oscurità, the Great Darkness. I realized that, from Talmet’s point of view, this sort of unanimity was beside the point. A convincing outburst and one or two participants hearing voices was all he needed to ensure an influx of clients. Some artful manipulation could always elicit such responses. These were people, I thought, who couldn’t take no for an answer, even from Death. Gripped by anxiety and longing, they viewed the séance as a kind of elaborate telegraph office, with Talmet the well-paid operator who knew the right codes. That was why they were willing to fork over 200,000 lire. Only the grim young woman had gone away dissatisfied; wanting urgently to speak to her late fiancé, she was furious when all she got was Talmet’s humming and Signora Starza’s hysteria.

  Champagne and canapés were served afterward. Talmet held court in a chair adorned with the Mocenigo coat of arms, a lion clutching crossed swords. Marczek was sprawled on a divan, deep in conversation with Signora Camarelli. Glass in hand, I wandered down the corridor, studying another set of Mocenigo portraits.

  I passed a succession of dark rooms, descended one stairway and climbed another, and at the end of an L-shaped corridor stepped into an enormous, musty room. It was an orangery, many centuries old. The roof was glass, the walls mirrored, and double doors gave onto a wide terrace. There was a fountain centered by a statue of Atalanta, in her tunic, stooping to pick up an orange. The marble floor, itself a faded mosaic of orange trees, was streaked with water stains. A hose was coiled in a puddle beside the planting table. At the time of the Crusades, this room must have housed over a hundred trees, imported from the Holy Land. They grew in wooden planters that could be wheeled onto the terrace in summer. Now there were just two rows of thin orange trees and a lone date palm. Dozens of empty, broken planters lined the wall.

  I sat on the edge of the fountain and finished my champagne. Reaching into my jacket pocket for one of Marczek’s Cuban cigars, I instead pulled out a handful of letters the concierge had given me when I was leaving my hotel. I had forgotten all about them. There was a laundry bill, a library notice, a letter from my landlord in Paris, and another letter—twice forwarded, ricocheting across the Atlantic and back—from Pericles Arvanos, postmarked two weeks earlier in Athens.

  I knew at once what it was. I hadn’t heard from Arvanos, or my father, in three years. Once our financial connection ended, there was no social correspondence.

  I was at a séance, yet the spirit farthest from my thoughts was the one that might actually have been in transit from this world to the next. He had, however, contacted me so seldom in life that I couldn’t expect him to make the effort in death.

  My father was dead.

  5

  MY ROOM was on the top floor of a hotel on Mount Lykabettos that was ringed with eucalyptus trees. From the balcony, squinting into the sunlight, I could imagine the clean lines of the ancient city, the marble polis buried in the helter-skelter limestone of modern-day Athens. The landmarks of that vanished city had been fixed in my mind in New England classrooms long before I set foot in Greece: the Temple of Zeus, the Agora, Pnyx Hill, and the Parthenon rising in a cloud of bright dust. Beyond the sprawl of working-class neighborhoods to the north, I could make out the harbor at Piraeus beneath a layer of smog. Of the many freighters anchored there, one of them now belonged to me.

  I had just come from the offices of Pericles Arvanos, where he read me my father’s will. It had been difficult for me to travel to Greece, and so long as my father was alive, I never intended to do so. The associations were just too painful. Despite my passion for the language and the history, first and foremost it had been the place where my father lived when he chose not to live with me. I had always wanted to know why he made that choice, and I hoped when our business was concluded, Arvanos might fill me in on that and some other things.

  After all the years of transatlantic communications, I was as curious about Arvanos as I was about the will. I knew him only from those letters, and the (comically sinister) mental image I’d conjured up thirteen years earlier—swarthy, corpulent, ham-handed, with a bushy moustache and a deep voice—that in no way meshed with the man before me, who was pale, lanky, stooped, clean-shaven, with a musician’s hands and wispy white hair. His beige suit was well cut, his tortoise-shell glasses stylish. His English was excellent, for he had studied law in England as well as in Greece. He was soft-spoken, with an easy, almost slow-motion manner—not the sort of man I would have expected my father to entrust with his business affairs. I could barely imagine them in the same room together. That was my failing; when Arvanos addressed me in earnest, peering past the sta
cks of color-coded folders on his desk, and I got a closer look at his steady gray eyes, I knew exactly why my father had retained him. He specialized in maritime law, and his dusky office off Constitution Square was decorated with model ships and navigational maps, and an odd assortment of bric-a-brac, notably a stuffed kingfisher and a bronze statuette of a mermaid with mother-of-pearl scales. Across from his desk there was an oil painting of Odysseus’s ship sailing past the Sirens: the crew with beeswax in their ears pulling at the oars; the claw-footed Sirens singing on the reefs; and Odysseus, lashed to the mast, straining to get free.

  While I was fascinated with Arvanos, however, he seemed to have a strictly professional interest in me. What other kind should he have had? For years, he had been my sole conduit to my father. To him, I was the son of one of his many clients. When I walked into his office, the blinds drawn and cigarette smoke in the air, I was nervous and off-balance. Arvanos was cordial enough, but detached. Some of this, too, owed to the circumstances: I was the one, after all, being informed of my inheritance.

  I had not expected to inherit anything. The gulf between my father and me had grown so wide, the silence so resounding. And as far as I was concerned, he had fulfilled his financial obligations by supporting me generously, past the age of twenty-one. Unknown to him, he had even put Lena Moretti through college. Nothing more was necessary.

  That said, I was stunned by what he did leave me: not money or securities or land, but a 300,000-ton, 450-foot freighter. The Makara was currently under contract to a textile company that brought cargo from the Far East; after maintenance, insurance, and all other expenses, I would receive an income of eighty thousand dollars for the year.

  “Next year you can do what you please,” Arvanos said, “renew the contract or lease the ship to another client. Your father’s remaining cash will be used to overhaul the ship this winter.”